A RURAL DANCE FESTIVAL IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND MY BODY MY SPACE TRANSLATED ONTO WHATSAPP DURING COVID-19 THROUGH COMPRESSION AND EXPANSION Christo Doherty and Athena Mazarakis (South Africa) Abstract In 2021, after a year’s hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual My Body My Space Public Arts Festival in South Africa, was relaunched in a radically different online form. Under the lockdown conditions of 2021, the festival was presented exclusively through the WhatsApp messaging application, running on a “behavioral chat platform” originally developed for public health text messaging. The experience of launching the festival into this new medium led to several unexpected insights, notably the specific affordances and limitations of the chosen online platform, an expanded understanding of the “interactivity” possible with online communications, and the digital empowerment that the process offered to practitioners who were mentored through the process of online translation. At a theoretical level, the experience of My Body My Space as an online festival also challenges the dichotomy between the relative status of performance and documentation in live arts. Keywords: behavioral chat platform, dance festival, digital empowerment, documented performance, interactivity, live performance In 2021, after a year’s hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual My Body My Space (MBMS) Public Arts Festival in South Africa was relaunched in a radically different online form. The 2021 festival was presented exclusively through the WhatsApp messaging application, running on a “behavioral chat platform” that had been developed for public health messaging, primarily text-based, originally to address pregnant women. The choice of this distribution platform was determined by the festival curators’ understanding of their rural audience, and the imperative to use an online platform they believed was accessible and affordable for their primary audience of poverty-stricken youth; yet the curators faced the challenge of needing to empower the artists in the festival to translate their performance ideas for distribution through a stringently short-format medium. The experience of launching the festival into this new medium led to several unexpected insights in the process of adapting to the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The key insights, which will be explored in this article, concerned the specific affordances and limitations of the chosen online platform, an expanded understanding of the “interactivity” possible with online communications, and the digital empowerment that the process offered to practitioners who were mentored through the process of online translation. At a theoretical level, the experience of My Body My Space as an online festival also challenges the dichotomy between the relative status of performance and documentation in live arts. The experience of translating MBMS through the WhatsApp messaging suggests the distinction over “live” versus A RURAL DANCE FESTIVAL IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND / 59 “documented” performance is increasingly untenable as we move beyond mediatization and deeper into the digitization of experience, a move that was greatly accelerated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Context MBMS is one of the most determinedly remote arts festivals in South Africa. Adrienne Sichel (2017), a leading African contemporary dance critic, has described MBMS as a “game changer on the South African and African arts and contemporary dance festival front . . . because . . . this event is off the conventional dance festival grid.” Since 2016, the festival has been an annual event in the Emakhazeni region of Mpumalanga, a rural province on the eastern border of South Africa. Like most of rural South Africa, the region is mired in poverty, with shockingly high levels of unemployment, which is particularly acute among the youth. Initiated and implemented by The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative (FATC), which relocated from Johannesburg to Emakhazeni in 2015, the festival is embedded within an extensive and ongoing dance education program, LEAP, directed at the children and youth of the rural townships in the area. The festival is strongly positioned as a socially engaged art intervention in the area. It brings together top avant-garde dance companies, independent artists, and the children and youth from LEAP in a program of site-specific performances that are curated in a manner that activates a wide range of locations around the Emakhazeni region. These range from open hillsides and Figure 1. MBMS Artistic Director, P. J. Sabbagha with umbrella, leading the 2016 festival crowd between sites. Photo by Christo Doherty. 60 / TURBA riverbanks to the community halls and streets of the townships. A typical day of the festival focuses on a particular location, and the audience—consisting largely of local youth and children, together with the artists involved in the festival, and a small number of national and international visitors—are led by one of the festival’s directors, carrying a large multicolored umbrella to each successive performance site. In this way, the festival audience stitches diverse spaces together that are still marked by apartheid spatial planning, creating new routes and experiences that perforate socioeconomic boundaries that divide the area. This reflects the festival’s deep commitment to democratizing access to the arts and taking art to where people are, particularly in rural areas. As emphasized by its name, the festival is an event about physical bodies (re)claiming actual physical spaces. As Sichel (2017) has observed about the pre-2021 festivals, “MBMS’s astutely curated interventions happen in real time in real life,” so the impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns—which were first imposed in March 2020 in South Africa—was profound. The festival was put into abeyance for 2020, and FATC channeled its efforts into a feeding scheme for the growing number of desperately hungry in the area. When it became clear that the pandemic would continue into 2021, the organizers began to plan an online festival. Due to its focus on the rural audiences in the area, the curators of MBMS faced significant challenges in moving the festival online. Free access to the festival has always been a priority for festival organizers, which historically meant busing audiences in from the more remote surrounding townships to performances taking place in the different physical locations selected as part of the curatorial strategy for the festival. Several of the major South African arts festivals, notably the National Arts Festival (NAF), did go online in 2020, so MBMS was able to draw from their experience.2 Most of the South African festivals that went online in 2020 used a website with a ticketing infrastructure to allow controlled access to video recordings and occasional live streams of performances.3 Although aimed at elite audiences, with the means to pay for tickets and with access to computers and data for experiencing the online material, these festivals reported that a significant proportion of their users accessed the material from their cell phones. The curators of MBMS had already, during the lull in 2020, begun using cell phones and WhatsApp to conduct remote teaching for their education program in the Emakhazeni area. In South Africa, like most of the continent, most users access the internet through their cell phones and make extensive use of messaging systems such as WhatsApp, with the major South African cell phone networks offering reduced price data packages based on WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger (Ceci 2021). Choice of Distribution Platform Having identified WhatsApp as the messaging system best suited to their audience, the curators of MBMS—through a series of serendipitous connec- A RURAL DANCE FESTIVAL IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND / 61 tions—found themselves in discussion with the Turn.io distribution platform. Turn.io is a “behavioral chat platform” developed in South Africa for delivering medical information at low costs to communities (P. J. Sabbagha, WhatsApp interview with Athena Mazarakis, February 2022). It evolved out of an earlier SMS-based system called MomConnect that was developed by the South African National Department of Health to improve maternal health and antenatal services for women in low-income communities. Launched in 2014, pregnant women would register for the MomConnect service through their local community clinic and then receive weekly information updates in the form of SMS messages to their cell phones. The service also allowed pregnant women to access, via SMS, an interactive help desk to ask questions and report on their experiences with their health care facilities.4 In 2017 the system was transferred to WhatsApp, making the delivery of personal messages more secure and—most importantly for the low-income users in South Africa—significantly more affordable. The chat facility in WhatsApp also enabled richer real-time interactions with the help-desk service. The move onto WhatsApp resulted in “an explosion of engagement” (Turn.io 2022), with pregnant women almost seven times more likely to reach out for information to the MomConnect help desk on WhatsApp than the previous SMS-based service, and three times more likely to stay connected to the service. The system has been taken up by a wide variety of social organizations, including the World Health Organization, which, together with the South African National Department of Health, used Turn.io to deliver up-to-date and reliable information to tens of millions of people during the COVID-19 pandemic. While Turn.io is a distribution system capable of massive scale and can handle sophisticated chat through its AI-driven question-and-answer system, it was primarily designed as a text delivery device. Although different clients had used short videos for conveying information, the system had never been used for something like an arts festival, with video clips as the primary format. In translating the experience of the live arts festival into an experience mediated through WhatsApp, the curators of My Body My Space, and the participating artists, had to work within the file size limits of the messaging service. WhatsApp can handle video and audio but with a strict 16-megabyte file size limit, meaning the works presented through Turn.io had to be one to three minutes in duration. Many of the established artists or companies familiar with the conventions of ScreenDance and with budgets for production responded to the MBMS call with long-form videos exceeding the size limit. Festival curators chose to include some of these works but had to house them on Vimeo. Short teasers of these works, within the size limit, were included on the WhatsApp line but directed viewers to the full-length videos on the Vimeo platform.5 The videos that embraced the short format form, however, were primarily those created by young artists who had little to no prior experience with video production. Aware that such artists required the skills and mentoring to restate their live performance work as short form videos, designed for viewing on a 62 / TURBA cell phone, the festival curators channeled a large part of their budget into a digital dance mentorship for these artists. Two digital mentorship companies6 were contracted to provide online workshops for the participating artists. Due to the COVID lockdowns, the workshops and mentoring were themselves provided through WhatsApp. The participating artists received short videos on key aspects of digital film production on WhatsApp, practiced the techniques, and then sent their completed training exercises via WhatsApp to the trainers for comment and feedback. The artists used their cell phones as the primary recording devices and were encouraged to use their phones for the postproduction via editing apps. The result of this approach was that the artists conceptualized their work for consumption on a cell phone, a process most experienced as one of “compression.” The curators faced another limitation imposed by the medium: unlike a web-based online festival, the material for the 2021 MBMS festival was activated through a series of text-based cues, or in the terminology of the Turn.io system, “prompts.” In an attempt to replicate a core aspect of the live festival, that being the way the audience actively navigate their way through the physical space of Emakhazeni, the online material for the 2021 festival was organized using the thematic structure of Body and Space. The intention Figure 2: Diagram of the planned navigation system. A RURAL DANCE FESTIVAL IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND / 63 was to afford the audience the opportunity to digitally navigate through the menus of Body and Space and their respective submenus, as a way of mirroring their physical movement through space in the live event. The submenus were furthermore designed to invite an actual physical engagement of a variety of real spaces for the viewer by encouraging audiences to view the digital work in Private or Public spaces, as well as to invite an embodied experience of viewing by asking the audience to watch the work Alone or Together with others, while Moving or Still. This curatorial intention of retaining a real-world engagement of actual bodies moving through real physical spaces while viewing the works was central in the design of a prompt-based navigational structure of menus and submenus. Participating artists were asked to situate their proposed work in one of the two categories, Body or Space, and their relevant submenus. The festival team then dedicated significant time— arguably much longer than the time usually dedicated to logistical planning of the live, physical festival historically—to building this navigational architecture of menus and submenus and to uploading each of the more than ninety works to the system. After the Launch After the launch of the online festival on 29 January 2021, it soon became apparent that the navigation system, set up with such attention to the original live festival, was redundant, or even a hinderance, to the way most users accessed content on WhatsApp. The festival team working on the back end of the line spent a great deal of time assisting users who were stuck, or lost, within the navigation system itself and unable to access the works. A list of works in alphabetical order, with their corresponding prompts, had already been drawn up and was available to audiences for easier access to the works. This list became the shortcut, promoted by the festival team for accessing the work more directly. One of the quandaries that the curators faced in using the Turn.io platform was that it limited the most common form of interactivity associated with online media. Users of MBMS2021 could not leave comments or engage with other viewers in discussion of the works. While this was technically possible on the system, it would have required moderation that was beyond the limited staffing capabilities of the team organizing the festival. As it was, the organizers spent much time in guiding users who had become stuck in the menu/prompt system. Yet what did emerge was an entirely unexpected form of interactivity. WhatsApp as a messaging medium lends itself to “forwarding.” As Pablo Boczkowski and colleagues found in their comparative study of the specific affordances offered by different social media platforms, “WhatsApp is used to share quick information with close friends and family” (2018: 255).7 Users of MBMS could effortlessly forward material such as the video clips of performances to the friends and family in their contacts list. As reported by many 64 / TURBA of the participants in the festival, performers could send their work to family, most of whom had never attended a public arts festival or even seen their “live” performances. In turn, the video clips could be forwarded to the wider circles of family networks and brought in through this process of “expansion” new viewers, many of whom would not have been able to be in the audience for the live festival. Another unanticipated aspect of the online festival was that it returned the event to bodies and spaces, but these were the domestic spaces of the performers working under the restrictions of the COVID-19 lockdowns. The video clips on the festival program reveal a rich panoply of domestic and private spaces that were inhabited by the performing artists in South Africa (and beyond) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Living rooms, kitchens, township streets, and patches of adjoining wilderness became the stages on which the performers expressed their embodied experience of existence during the pandemic. In this way, the platform performed digitally what the live festival did in how it perforated spatial boundaries that the audience would not ordinarily traverse, providing a window into other lived realities. As one of the young performers and WhatsApp video creators put it: “Our bodies and our spaces became so important. They became the main focus because the pandemic forced all of us to tune in in ways we never imagined” (Thozama Busakwe, Zoom interview with Christo Doherty, 18 August 2021). In another very profound sense, this was another aspect of the “expansion” made possible by the online festival. The number of site-specific performances, and locations, that were captured in the video clips went far beyond what was possible in the physical festival. Simultaneously, this was a process of “compression” for the audience, as this vast range of personal and public spaces and the experiences presented in the videos, and within these private spaces, were now in the palm of the audience’s hand, as afforded by the intimate, personal, direct, and tactile relation we have with our cell phones. The key learning emerging out of the MBMS online festival was that while the festival team was working toward providing access to the festival at a local level, it soon became very clear that access for the local rural Emakhazeni was not possible. While the festival was able to reach a larger international and national audience that it would not ordinarily have reached, the target beneficiaries of the local children and youth were unable to participate in the festival. This access was restricted due to the dire socioeconomic conditions in that community; these conditions meant the traditional audience base had limited to no access to data, to technology, and to the internet. Basic socioeconomic factors such as limited literacy further played a part in limiting access to the festival content. So, as much as the festival team did to ensure as accessible a festival as possible, by choosing WhatsApp as a distribution platform, the basic conditions of its primary target audience excluded access to the festival. Philip Auslander has always insisted that “to understand the relationship between live and mediatized forms, it is necessary to investigate that rela- A RURAL DANCE FESTIVAL IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND / 65 tionship as historical and contingent, not as ontologically given or technologically determined” (2008: 72). Yet, as he admits, his own attempt at this understanding was based on “the central paradigm” of the televisual. The developments discussed in this account of how a live public arts festival in rural Africa was compressed and expanded through the affordances offered by a specific social media platform suggest that for the artists who embraced the opportunity, the digital, even beyond the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic, may offer a different relationship to the presumed priority of the “live” performance, a relationship that is beginning to be determined by the digital, networked representation of performance. The young artists who were empowered by the process of compression and expansion through WhatsApp see a newly opened horizon of possibilities for themselves as digital artists. In the words of one of the participating artists: “What this has shown me is that we can create work from anywhere we are. We can do collaborations from wherever we are. It’s just about the communication” (Nomfundo Hlongwa, Zoom interview with Christo Doherty, 16 August 2021). The lessons that can be learned for future iterations of the My Body My Space festival and other such live curated events going into the post-COVID future are worth spelling out. While WhatsApp, as a distribution system, did not allow the festival to reach its target audiences of youth in the surrounding rural communities, it greatly expanded the festival’s reach to national and even international audiences. Although the curators have chosen to concentrate on the live festival post-COVID, the WhatsApp festival in 2021 demonstrated that young artists, with training and support, can creatively augment their live performances with short social-media friendly videos produced at almost no cost using their cell phones. These videos can be integrated into live performances or distributed during or after the live festival, as a way of expanding the global reach of such events. Acknowledgments We wish to thank all the digital mentors and mentees who discussed with us the experience of translating their performances for the WhatsApp platform used in MBMS2021: Darion Adams, Thozama Busakwe, Nomfundo Hlongwa, Lucia Walker, Lawrence Simelane, Phulusho Khwiyane, Kamogelo Molobye, Mbali Ndlozi, Selina Mohlala, Amy Louise Wilson, Tankiso Pheko, Francois Knoetze, and Jessica Denyschen. We also congratulate the MBMS curatorial team on what they achieved with the 2021 festival: PJ Sabbagha, Tshego Khutsoane, Nicholas Aphane, Shawn Mothupi, Nelisiwe Mkhawane. Christo Doherty is Deputy Head of the School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a photographer and video artist who documented the My Body My Space rural public arts festival for five years (2016–2019) before the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. 66 / TURBA Previously, he was cofounder and creative director of the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival. Athena Mazarakis is a South African choreographer, performer, somatic arts educator, arts manager, researcher, and embodied mindfulness practitioner. She currently fulfils the role of “Momenteur” of SO | The Academy for the Less Good Idea, and previously served as the Development Manager of the Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative. She was pivotal in the curatorial team of My Body My Space (2016–2021). Notes 1. Peggy Phelan’s assertion that “to the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology” (1993: 146) has been contested by Philip Auslander who argues, convincingly in our view, that “‘live’ performance, under the conditions of a thoroughly mediatized cultural economy, cannot be ontologically separated from the media representations of performance” (2008:56). 2. A comprehensive overview of the South African festival environment during the COVID-19 lockdowns can be found at the website of the Future Festivals research project, www.future-festivals.org. 3. The NAF (2020) specified that “visitors can choose from a Full V[irtual]NAF Pass which would include the Daily Programme for the full eleven days (including the Standard Bank Jazz Festival), a daily pass—for which audiences can stream works falling on that specific day on demand—and a Jazz Pass for those who were focused on the jazz alone. Audiences can also buy single tickets for single shows.” 4. The service was expanded in 2016 to support HIV treatment through the South African National Health System. 5. The 2021 WhatsApp festival featured 213 artists and performers in the program. 6. The Digital Dance Mentorship was led by Jessica Denyschen of Phoenix and Owl Productions and Amy Louise Wilson and Francois Knoetze of Low-Def Film Factory. 7. The specific affordances of the other social media platforms surveyed in the study were as follows: “Facebook is used to divulge content which they want to disseminate widely; Instagram is used to post careful and stylized constructed visual portraits of everyday life; Twitter is used to get news and comment about it; and Snapchat is for fun instantaneous communications with close friends” (Boczkowski et al. 2018: 255). References Auslander, Philip. 2008. Liveness: Performance in a Mediated Culture. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Boczkowski, Pablo J., Mora Matassi, and Eugenia Michelstein. 2018. “How Young Users Deal with Multiple Platforms: The Role of Meaning Making in Social Media Repertoires.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 23: 245–259. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmy012. A RURAL DANCE FESTIVAL IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND / 67 Ceci, L. 2021. “The Most Popular Mobile Apps in South Africa 2020, by Reach.” Statistica.com, 3 November. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103151/mostpopular-mobile-apps-south-africa. NAF (National Arts Festival). 2020. “Lift Off for the First Online National Arts Festival.” 25 June. https://nationalartsfestival.co.za/news/vnaf2020-launch-me dia-conference. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Sichel, Adrienne. 2017. “Bodyscaping Landscapes and Perceptions: An Overview of South Africa’s My Body My Space Rural Arts and Culture Festival.” Theatre Times, 18 March. https://thetheatretimes.com/bodyscaping-landscapes-percep tions-overview-south-africas-body-space-rural-arts-culture-festival. Turn.io. 2022. “About the Company.” Accessed 5 July. https://www.turn.io/company/ about.